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Lawns now adorn what was once a road in front of nine Meaford cottages. The big question for cottage owners and townsfolk alike: Is it still a road? Over time, the stretch has been called a "private road," "driveway," "private mutual right-of-way" and "marine allowance." (KEN KIDD / TORONTO STAR)

Yet as much as he professes to love the place, and the house-sized cottage he’s built here, Grist has been an infrequent visitor of late. “We haven’t basically come up.”

The reason, or the root of it, lies just outside the window, in the relative sliver of land that separates his house from the crashing waves of Georgian Bay. There’s a patio out there, with a hot tub, then steps down to the pebble beach.

This is land that the municipality of Meaford now claims is mostly part of a public road, which is how some people, including a few of his neighbours, have tended to treat it.

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“We’d have a barbecue out here and people would just walk through,” says Grist, who hadn’t quite figured on that when he purchased the property in 2004.

“When we bought this, we did all the (title) searches, had the surveys done before I closed the deal,” he says. “We had a survey done for the building, for the setbacks.”

Meaford duly issued a building permit, all seemingly on the assumption that a previous right-of-way, partly washed out in 1986, had never been a municipal road.

Until, that is, another cottager went foraging in the archives and found an 1854 by-law referencing just such a road — a by-law Meaford and its pre-amalgamation predecessors had never registered on the title of anybody’s property.

That by-law, unknown and/or ignored for more than a century, is now at the heart of a blossoming lawsuit that has already racked up close to $1 million in legal fees, and turned neighbours into viciously bickering rivals.

It would be easy to cast this as a conflict of cultures, between an older, almost communal take on cottage life and a more recent one revolving around grand houses and privacy. Or one that pits Toronto nouveau riche against Meaford retirees.

But long-time residents, some with roots here going back to the 1920s and ‘30s, fall into both sides of the dispute. Old friendships have ended, the atmosphere grown poisonous as rumour and innuendo flourish. It doesn’t take long for coarse language and references to various acts of bullying to enter any conversation about the road.

Along what’s called South Georgian Beach, there’s a lakeside road running in front of the cottages. That road used to continue into what’s now North Georgian Beach, though only past the first nine cottages before coming to a dead end.

Access became a problem when part of the road was washed out in front of those nine cottages, the area where Grist later bought his land.

“We, as a municipality, were concerned they wouldn’t have fire protection or ambulance service,” says Gerald Shortt, who served as Reeve of the former Township of St. Vincent from 1982 until it was amalgamated with Meaford at the end of 2000.

But St. Vincent wasn’t about to rebuild the waterfront access. “In my opinion, I always thought it was a private road,” says Shortt, now a Meaford councillor.

Instead, the cottagers were encouraged to buy additional land at the rear of their places and build a private road there, instead. That road, in turn, now connects with another one that runs behind the cottages further up North Georgian Beach.

In front of the nine cottages, lawns and landscaping inevitably started migrating over top of the old waterfront road. But it wasn’t until the early and mid-2000s, with the arrival of Grist and others, that the unpleasantries seem to have begun in earnest.

The turning point may well have been the day then-councillor Francis Richardson tried to ride his bicycle across the front of Grist’s place. A nasty exchange ensued. “That’s basically the start of it,” claims Grist.

In 2007, Meaford launched its lawsuit against owners of the nine cottages.

Richardson is now Meaford’s mayor, having defeated an electoral rival in 2006 that Grist had actively supported. These days, though, Richardson won’t comment on the road because of a perceived conflict.

The Grists bought their property from Richardson’s cousin.

“The perception (of conflict) is there and the people involved were using it and I finally said, we don’t need to have any more problems or confusion with this issue,” says Richardson.

He’s now recused himself from any discussion of the matter at council, a majority of which backs the lawsuit.

By taking legal action, says Grist, “they thought we’d back down.”

If so, it was a miscalculation. Grist and the owners of three of the other cottages have been fighting back.

Now in his early 40s, Grist is one of those guys who seems not so much tall as wide, a scrum half in his days playing semi-pro rugby in Britain. Trained as a bricklayer, he’d landed in Canada in 1986 with $50 in his pocket and gone on to create one of the biggest building restoration companies in the GTA.

He’s not one to give way easily. “I don’t know if you’d call it bullying or not, but pushing his interest,” says Shortt, who opposes the Meaford lawsuit.

By the time Richardson happened along on his bike, Grist had poured $1.2 million into buying the land and building a monster house-cum-cottage for his wife and three kids.

To that Grist can now add roughly $200,000 in his own legal fees. (He reckons his fellow defendants, or at least the ones on three other lots who are also fighting the case, have spent another $350,000 on lawyers.)

“The cow stuck his head in the tent one morning,” says Hunter. “I was scared as hell. It’s stuck with me all my life.”

The Hunter clan ended up here because Hunter’s parents were chummy with the grandmother of Rhonda Emerson, now a Grist foe.

Hunter’s late brother, Harold, eventually came to have his own cottage on South Georgian Beach. “As far back as I can remember,” says Hunter, “I used to go back and forth on that road all the time.”

Around Hunter’s part of North Georgian Beach, the cottages tend to be old, modest and unfenced. They speak to a cottage milieu in which kids scamper everywhere and the parents walk about with drinks in their hands, visiting neighbours, ahead of evenings spent playing euchre and Scrabble.

“If I was out here splitting wood ten years ago, 30 people would come by,” says Chris Emerson, Rhonda’s husband. “This was a wonderful community and people here walked.”

They also cycled, at least when there was a road in front of Grist’s place and the other eight cottages. “Before, you could use a bike and be into town in 15 minutes, nice and safe,” says Doug McCutcheon, who has also exchanged personal lawsuits with Grist. “Now you can’t do that.”

Both he and the municipality insist that a road is a road, and you can’t just take it away.

In its pleadings, Meaford says the 1854 by-law clearly established the road, and even if it didn’t the eventual lakeshore route was used by “the travelling public” and “became a public municipal road decades ago.”

St. Vincent maintained the road without any financial help from cottagers until 1982. Afterwards, the township gave money to the cottagers’ association to do the work.

But there’s a larger irony at play — and another judicial quirk of history.

The lakeside road that used to run in front of Grist’s place always stopped before it got to Emerson’s place. It never went further north, past the Hunters and McCutcheons. Access to their cottages comes courtesy of the original road at the back of their lots, even though maps from the 1920s on depicted a road-like “marine allowance” running across their front lawns as well.

Or, at least, the maps did until 1950, when, at the municipality’s behest, a court order approved a new survey that struck out the words “marine allowance” from that part of the beach.

“Any damages or costs accruing by establishing the said road to be paid by the requisitionists,” says the by-law.

In other words, if residents want a road, they’ll have to pay for it.

But a note scribbled on the by-law, presumably at a later date, says that sentence “has been quashed by the Court of Queen’s Bench.”

Grist’s lawyers say they’ve been unable to find that court decision, which would have been made prior to 1881, when the Court of Queen’s Bench was reorganized.

Ever since, the path or road has gone by a dizzying variety of names, depending on which map or survey you look at, or which person is talking about it.

It’s been called a “private road,” a “driveway” and a “private mutual right-of-way” as well a “marine allowance.”

When Union Gas came along in 1994 to install a natural gas line under the road, the company negotiated easements with residents, not the municipality.

And as late as 2005, after the 1854 by-law had surfaced, a Meaford staff report still concluded the road had only been a “right of way” and that “there is no indication of a municipal road dedication.”

Yet successive municipal governments gave annual grants to the cottagers’ associations to help defray the costs of maintaining the road, though not with any strings attached.

“We can hang flower pots with it if we want,” says Shirley Moore, who lives year-round with husband Clayton in the cottage his father built out of logs in 1942.

The Moores are technically in South Georgian Beach, but they’re opposed to having any public road opened in front of Grist’s house, fearing it could lead to an entire waterfront system connected to the Bruce Trail.

That could bring a lot of traffic. “Then you’ve got to put up with the dog poop and all the crap people leave,” says Clayton Moore.

It’s a position that has, inevitably, cost him friendships.

“I used to drink with him and fish with him,” Clayton Moore says of a long-time cottager in North Georgian Beach. “But we parted ways.”

But the court did accede to another motion from the Grist camp, involving the 1854 by-law about a lakeshore road.

As originally written, the by-law covers roughly 6,000 feet of waterfront, not just the 600 or so feet in front of the nine cottages. Grist’s lawyers argued that this was unfair, since anyone affected by the 1854 by-law ought to be involved in the lawsuit.

So the court has now ordered that “all persons or corporations with a registered interest” in land covered by the by-law join the list of defendants. That means everyone from the cottage owners and mortgage-holders to companies with easements for natural gas lines.

By one count, that would raise the number of cottage lots involved to 76, including those of the Emersons, Hunters and McCutcheons, and perhaps 150 individuals.

Technically, that makes Emerson a defendant in a case he’s convinced the municipality should win. “Because you’ve got a lot of money to throw around, doesn’t make it right,” he says of Grist.

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